The Other Serbia

Theatre, Nationalism, and Disintegration of the Former Yugoslavia

The following excerpt from an interview with Mirjana Miocinovic was conducted by Milica Lucia-Cavic for Glas, a bulletin issued by The Center for Antiwar Action, Belgrade. Ms. Miocinovic is a professor at the University of Belgrade and a theatre expert and translator. She is a public figure whose courageous action and blunt opinions have earned her the respect and admiration of the democratic public in Serbia. During the war, she voluntarily gave up her chair as professor.

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Why did you leave the university and what was the reaction of your students, your colleagues, and your friends?

It was at the very beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, during the first days of the assault on Dubrovnik, when among the first civilians to be killed was Milan Milisic, a poet and a good friend. To simplify the entire episode, I shall quote an excerpt from the letter I sent to the Dean of the Belgrade University School of Theatre Arts: “Faced with the horrific destruction of the country I still consider as my homeland, and knowing that the nation to which I belong is playing a major part in this destruction, both as the victim and the perpetrator, I hereby inform you that under such circumstances I cannot and I will not teach at a school which did not find a way to oppose all of this.”

It has been exactly four years since I wrote the letter and from this perspective it becomes even clearer to me to what extent the individual person is helpless in societies such as this, in other words, societies that are distrustful of any kind of solidarity, especially with someone who is weaker. These are societies that cherish loyalty, but loyalty to one who is stronger, loyalty that is in fact obedience.

Since I never returned to my school, I really don’t know the reaction of my colleagues, nor my students, for that matter. If I were to judge from the fact that many of them have stopped calling me and don’t respond to my greeting when we meet on the street, my action must have seem to them as some kind of scandal. What is it that I have violated? Is it their “patriotism,” their “national feelings,” or perhaps I have upset their conscience. If it is the latter, I am sure that I will not easily be forgiven. As for my students, for me they are one of the greatest enigmas. Where are the roots of their indifference? Except for a militant, neo-fascist core, whose ideologists are situated in my very school, the students were not in favor of war. But the fact is that they never really gave any mass opposition to the war. Even their brief rebellion in 1992 was more of a social character; they were more interested in prices of Coca Cola than the terrible fact that a war was raging. It is up to the social psychologists to explain this phenomenon. For me, they were simply the sons of their fathers, sinking into conformity, unaccustomed to think with their own heads, but still cunning enough to know how to look out for themselves. Perhaps this judgment is without nuances, but exceptions were too few not to make me believe that perhaps I was right. As far as my friends are concerned, our friendships were made a long time ago along the lines of “selection by affinity,” and I had no, or virtually no, surprises.

What is happening to the intellectuals? Why do they remain silent?

The intelligentsia has so often placed itself in the service of ruthless ideas and systems during the twentieth century, this “treason of clerics,” as Benda calls it, is a kind of distinctive trait of this century, so the attitude of intellectuals in our own circumstances during the past several years is not very surprising. The more so since it was mostly a communist intelligentsia (if this concept in itself is not preposterous) which never was capable of thinking outside the framework of simplifying systems, “great projects” which can easily be interchanged. Our own...